May 18, 2017

Jupiter's Little Red Spot

This view of Jupiter, taken by the JunoCam imager of NASA's Juno spacecraft, highlights Oval BA -- a massive storm known as the Little Red Spot. Despite its unofficial name, the Little Red Spot is about as wide as Earth. The storm reached its current size when three smaller spots collided and merged in the year 2000. The Great Red Spot, which is about twice as wide as the Little Red Spot, may have formed from the same process centuries ago.

Juno acquired this image on February 2, 2017, at 6:13 a.m. PDT (9:13 a.m. EDT), as the spacecraft performed a close flyby of Jupiter. When the image was taken, the spacecraft was about 9,000 miles (14,500 kilometers) from the planet.